Malaysian Air Flight MH370: Exit Pursued by Conspiracy

Readers of this site must imagine my head so deep in…ah, Thai politics all the time, and so rapt therewith, I never think about what everybody else is thinking about — which appears to be Malaysian Air Flight MH370.

That’s not true: just as you do, I wonder all the time what happened.

My imagination was captured by its disappearance from the day headlines first hit the press, 8th March, but I refrained from belaboring readers with the admittedly uninformed musings of a mere tyro. Major news services and broadcast media have reported the opinions of real experts in various related fields daily — nay, hourly — for nearly a month.

But their expertise has been of no avail, their opinions on the matter scarcely more relevant than your dog’s, and the mystery of Flight MH370 grows darker despite detailed reports on:

1) Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s relationship with his wife
2) His politics
3) The state of his home flight simulator hard disk and why he practised landing on Diego Garcia Island, chief US base in the Indian Ocean
4) Whether it was his or the co-pilot’s voice heard signing off that night
5) Whether that sign-off to air traffic control was, “All right. Good Night,” or “Good night. Malaysian MH370,”
6) Whether the steward’s last words to his wife, “I love you,” were more than usually pregnant with meaning

Satellite reconnaissance, digital imaging, astrological predictions and retrieval of floating junk by a large fleet of warships have also proved bootless, together with psychological analysis of an hour-long cockpit conversation transcript. Recrimination of distraught relatives, amended statements from the prime minister of Malaysia, sneers from the FBI, and a race among the powers to discover which has the Hercule Poirot-like sleuthing abilities necessary to solve this case — all but “chasing after wind.”

So, why shouldn’t I weigh in with my two cents?

Such speculation has proved a boon to many: CNN’s ratings, for example, jumped 60 percent after they started covering the story 24/7. Agatha Christie couldn’t have invented a better mystery, nor Ian Fleming a more unlikely plot.

Perhaps this Website can profit, too.

I must admit thinking, early on, the story might supply the plot for a new James Bond action thriller. Whether the series producers agree or not remains to be seen, but I am confident, whether the plane is found or not, the tale will live on, as the Kennedy assassinations and World Trade Center incident do: grist for endless theorising, spawning a small industry for researchers, authors, talk show hosts and ‘documentary’ makers.

Doubtless the CIA will receive its 40 lashes. Having replaced the KGB and Mossad as the world’s chief bogeyman, with its undeniable record of arming terrorists and selling drugs, and with stories about ‘the firm’s’ sociopathic behaviour now accepted even by staunch allies in the US Congress (see here) — nothing, and I mean NOTHING, is too implausible to blame on the CIA.

Moreover, the CIA is one group with personnel and resources sufficient to make a jumbo jet vanish into thin air. Remember, this is the same crew that, according to the Soviets, equipped airliners with spy electronics and had them venture into Soviet airspace to test Russian response around Sakhalin Island. The response was straight-forward: stop trespassing or we’ll shoot the things down. The US government thumbed its collective nose at the Russian, so, on 1st September, 1983, when a Korean Airlines 747 strayed from the NOPAC North Pacific air corridor, the Soviets scrambled SU-15 fighters to shoot it down. On board were 269 persons, including 29 crew (six of whom it is asserted were deadheading — that is, getting a free ride — elsewhere).

Among the passengers was a U.S congressman from Georgia, Lawrence MacDonald, who just happened to be a president of the extremist John Birch Society, a right-wing group actually founded on certain conspiracy theories. Birchers tend to be impassioned, fact-oriented, tenacious — rather like Suthep and his pals in Thailand’s People’s Democratic Reform Committee.

MacDonald’s type of fanatic is dangerous, because, as fellow conspiracy theorist David Icke once observed: “Today’s mighty oak is just yesterday’s nut — that held its ground.”

MacDonald, then, was a guy some folks might want to get rid of. Another person scheduled for the flight, who changed his mind at the last moment, was Richard M. Nixon, the disgraced former president of the United States and a man whose memoirs might prove inconvenient to a number of powerful people.

The KAL aircraft deviated more than 320 kilometres from its route, flying over Kamchatka and finally over Sakhalin. Two Sukhoi Su-15 fighters at Dolinsk-Sokol airbase were ordered to intercept the airliner.

“I wondered if it was a civilian aircraft,” Col. Gennadi Osipovitch, the pilot who fired on it, said during an interview in 1998 with American news service CNN. “Military cargo planes don’t have such windows.”

“I signaled in international code. I informed [the pilot] he was violating our airspace. He did not respond.”

Though the Soviets fired bright tracer shots as a warning, according to former Soviet Lt. Gen. Valentin Varennikov, the Korean pilots appeared unaware of fighters flying alongside.

After the plane was hit with a Kaliningrad R-8 air-to-air missile, it flew on for another five-to-seven minutes, during which time the co-pilot said twice the engines were working normally, then slowly spiraled downwards and disappeared near the island of Moneron in Soviet waters.

When news of the incident reached Washington and Moscow, outrage characterised both sides. US President Ronald Reagan described it as a massacre lacking “justification, legal or moral.” Yuri Andropov, general secretary of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union’s maximum leader (and like Putin a former KGB man) accused Washington of “sophisticated provocation, masterminded by the U.S. special services with use of a South Korean plane.”

The submerged wreckage was found weeks later: nothing intact remained, which Soviet divers — and others since — thought quite unusual. At least one diver said he was sure no passengers had been on board. Why? Because no bodies were found, nor cargo, nor luggage. The circumstance is unique in the annals of air crashes. The only items retrieved from the wreck, and apparently the sole evidence of passengers on board were 213 shoes.

Many think more lies behind the tale than either the Americans or Russians have admitted.

The official American story, that the pilots strayed off course quite accidentally — despite a number of electronics to keep them on course, despite constant contact with monitoring stations, and despite the fact that they well knew they were flying through some of the most sensitive airspace in the world — is generally discounted. The official Russian version, that it was indeed a commercial airliner engaged in spying, is more plausible, but leaves unexplained precisely what happened to turn a 747 — still in good flying trim five minutes after being hit with the missile — into so many tiny pieces, and where all trace of its passengers, cargo and luggage disappeared to.

Oh, and did I mention the doomed aircraft’s flight number — 007? I’m not joking, KAL 007 — that was its official number. You gotta admit those spooks have a sense of humour.

That notwithstanding, I do not think Malaysian MH370 was a CIA hit. In fact, I don’t know what to think, but I notice many others do and that’s what this column’s about.

One fellow blogging in groups.google is certain the plane was stolen, its passengers poisoned, all in preparation for a fake nuclear strike by Iran on another New York City landmark. The plan, he asserts, is not really Iranian — it is a Jewish plot, hatched by Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, who is a crypto-Jew, and AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group in the US. The plan is to pack the Boeing 777 so full of C4 explosives that when it hits the result will be violent enough to mimic a nuclear attack.

The reason to use C4 instead of the real thing is not because the Iranians can’t produce atomic bombs — they can and do — but because atomic bombs, like Iran’s president, are frauds and don’t do what people think they do.

Less crazy but still pretty far out, especially for a mainstream publication, comes this from Manager Online, the Thai-language business-and-politics-oriented Website associated with Manager Magazine and founded by former Yellow Shirt leader Sonthi Limtongkul.

Manager’s reporter noted that MH370 “disappeared all at once from radar,” a thing impossible unless the plane itself disappeared. That could not happen unless it were shot down or blew up, leaving either a) wreckage or b) trace of a missile’s firing, which radar picks up. “Moreover, no missile is known that can turn a commercial airliner into fragments so small as to be untraceable.” He also pointed out that the plane’s flight data recorder transmissions (which broadcast at 37.5 kHZ and in good conditions can be picked up at depths of 20,000 feet from 22 kilometres off) were no less in absence than the plane itself.

“What is certain, then, is that the plane was not hijacked, because that wouldn’t make it disappear from radar; and it did not blow up because no wreckage has been found. This suggests some new force abroad in the world, which is really scary — much more scary than if the plane went down because of technical problems. This suggests someone now is able to control the world using new and secret weaponry capable of making aircraft vanish.”

There’s a writer who likes watching Bond films. But who’s to say he is wrong? Perhaps whoever made MH370 disappear is also a Bond fan.

In a similar vein — but far more twisted — comes this (edited for space and readability) from Yoichi Shimatsu, “former editor of The Japan Times Weekly and founding faculty member of journalism schools in Hong Kong and Beijing.” He assures readers that sinister Hebrews, the now notorious Rothschilds, working through hapless American stooges, are behind the whole scenario, which involves a new type microchip:

Among the passengers bound for Beijing were 20 tech employees working for Freescale Semiconductors, based in Austin, Texas. Among these programmers and systems designers were twelve Malaysians and eight citizens of China.

The company is a former design subsidiary of Motorola. Freescale has design centers in Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chengdu and Suzhou.

Besides lucrative production of microchips for automotive components, Freescale has contracts with the U.S. military for navigation, periscopes, electronic targeting, guided missiles and other systems.

The company’s work was of interest to Japan, France, Britain, Russia, China and Iran.

What prompted the Pentagon to interdict a civilian airliner in flight, disposing of the passengers as shark bait?

A new micro-controller: the Kinesis KL02, which debuted in February of last year. The world’s smallest micro-controller at 1.9x2mm, it contains RAM, ROM and a clock. The company notes that the device is small enough to be swallowed for medical uses, such as releasing drugs according to a prescribed schedule or directing micro-surgery.

It is also a key to next-generation warfare.

Potential applications include:

– Fly-sized and smaller drones for surveillance or to deliver bio-warfare packets

This micro-controller, the core of America’s next-gen weapons systems, was developed in Malaysia, preponderantly Muslim, economically allied with China, Russia and Japan — and often at odds with US foreign policy.

Therefore testing of the device and possible manufacture in China were prospects the Pentagon could not tolerate.

As Freescale Malaysia prepared to test Kinesis at its sister research labs in Beijing and Tianjin, alarm bells sounded at the DARPA-funded Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A leading weapons-research facility created during World War II to build navigation systems and bomb sights, it now creates microchips for various military applications, including inertial guidance for ballistic missiles, communications, GPS, intelligent targeting systems, orbital piloting for the International Space Station, and, under cover of bio-medical development, the US trans-human super-soldier programme.

Kinesis also posed a dilemma related to civilian use of military technology, which threatens to wipe out America’s technological lead in warfare. Freescale’s executive management and several board members are connected with the Carlyle Group, which favors civilian commercialization of defence-related technologies, but the company is controlled financially by private-equity firm Blackstone. Major investors in the latter include the Rothschild banking family.

The Rothschilds and their allies in the Zionist movement are compelled to prevent miniaturized robotic weapons from falling into the hands of Israel’s enemies. So, the House of Rothschild ordered their neo-con subordinates inside the Pentagon to destroy MH370.

Further disparaging the pilot and co-pilot of the ill-fated flight is pointless. The pilot’s flight simulator showed he had practiced landing at Diego Garcia — indicating a deep background with Western intelligence and probably Israeli espionage teams operating out of Singapore.

But the NSA and US Air Force Space Command do not anyway need manned piloting to control a plane: the pilots were mere window-dressing, preserving an appearance of normality while taking off from Kuala Lumpur.

So what actually happened?

Voice communication and navigational signals were probably disabled by a burst of powerful narrow-aperture radar used for electromagnetic warfare. The cockpit computer was then reprogrammed, using Boeing’s own emergency piloting system — enhanced by Pentagon and Israeli software.

From the South China Sea to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the jetliner was controlled remotely by a drone operator. Its unscheduled flight path was tracked — but subsequently removed from data records by NSA listening posts in Sri Lanka, and at the Jindalee eavesdropping facility in northwest Australia. Radar stations in the Maldives, installed under a US maritime accord, helped guide the jetliner to the southernmost atoll of the archipelago, and towards Diego Garcia, immediately to the south.

The airliner descended smoothly over the Maldives, according to witnesses, and landed safely on Diego Garcia, where the CIA has a rendition centre with underground hangars and prison used during the Iraq and Afghan wars.

Upon arrival, passengers were herded into separate areas. Captives from Freescale were sent to a debriefing facility, their hard drives and smartphones confiscated, data downloaded, and human assets interrogated. “Join us or die with the rest,” they were told. Those cooperating might have new identities and be re-introduced to civilian life in remote North American communities after administration of memory-erasing drugs, similar to the ones developed in the MK-ULTRA program.

Uncooperative and high-risk captives were drowned, their corpses tossed into the sea near a phony ‘crash site’ off Western Australia. US submarines, meanwhile, discharged more bits of ‘evidence’. The plane’s crew was probably forced to walk the plank, disappearing into the jaws of waiting sharks.

Those who put their trust in American imperial power should expect no less.

With operations complete, mourning rituals will begin, and tearful American diplomats attend memorial services for victims of a tragic ‘accident’. But behind the scenes, a cabal of Air Force officers and defence contractors will be clinking beer mugs with their former boss and guru, General Michael Hayden, who militarized space and expanded the NSA into the global monstrosity it has become.

MH370 will be remembered on the History Channel as an unsolved riddle — but no TV station will mention the Kinesis microchip, the struggle for possession of which lay behind “the untimely deaths and mangled memories of any survivors.”

Well…ahem! Yoichi-san is not only all over the map with his exposition, he’s so sunk in conspiracy theory he’s lost track of reason: take a look at that last line — how can people who experienced ‘untimely deaths’ be described at the same time as ‘survivors’ with ‘mangled memories’? How can a plane the communication system of which is first disabled via a burst of radar (Huh?) then have its computer remotely re-programmed? Why would the Pentagon ‘erase’ the memories of engineers it went to such lengths to employ?

Why should the Pentagon, the Rothschilds, and the Israelis undertake so vast a conspiracy — exposing themselves to considerable risk while murdering over two hundred people — when they might much more easily order Freescale to do no testing or production in China? If it’s the engineers they’re worried about, they could hire them away.

Finally, what is this obsession with Rothschilds? Any conspiracy freak who does his homework will find the family began losing banking dominance over a hundred years ago. World War II fairly wiped them out, financially speaking, and while they remain undoubtedly a wealthy family, the richest Rothschild’s net worth is in the billion-dollar range — peanuts in today’s economy and certainly not enough to order the Pentagon about.

So, as reality, the tale falls flat. Nonetheless, the Voice of Russia picked up a version of the story, even reporting an interview with Freescale’s vice-president, who noted that his firm’s engineers on MH370 were “very important.”

But not THAT important.

As a James Bond thriller, though, the plot has real potential: just change the bad guys from the Pentagon and Rothschilds to the Kremlin and Bashar Assad and I’m confident Hollywood will take interest, Yoichi-san.

Then you, and I, might see the whole tale played out in living colour with the latest South Korean special effects. If you need help with the script, just let me know.

As for the mystery of what happened to MH370, Danica Weeks, wife of a New Zealander on the flight, summed it up neatly in an interview with CNN published today: “”The hardest process for me is understanding that a commercial airliner can just go black: that someone can turn off all communications, all matter of tracking an airliner — and it disappears.